Editorial: Will Obama Lose Egypt?

An Ally Imperiled: What Egyptians are demonstrating against, whether they know it or not, is socialism. What they — and we — could end up with is another Iran. Is President Obama repeating Carter's Shah betrayal?

Revolutions are like fires. They can make life better, or they can destroy.

Three decades ago, Iran — after being saved from Soviet dominance by the U.S. in 1953 — traded in the flawed autocratic rule of the Shah for the bloodthirsty Islamist fanaticism of the Ayatollah Khomeini.

At the time, Jimmy Carter's presidency was, in the name of "human rights," on the side of the Islamists — with U.N. Ambassador Andrew Young going so far as to call Khomeini "some kind of saint."

Does the Obama administration realize the difference between freedom-based revolutions and violent overthrows that will help jihadists?

In 2009, the Egyptian daily Almasry Alyoum reported that President Obama secretly met in Washington that year with representatives of Egypt's jihadist Muslim Brotherhood, the Hamas ally that, while banned, dominates the opposition in the country.

Obama also chose Egypt as the locale for his ill-conceived Muslim outreach speech in June 2009.

As Newsweek's Jonathan Alter points out in his White House-friendly book on the president's first year, "The Promise," "Obama never said the words 'terrorism,' 'terrorist,' or 'war on terror'" in the speech, because "the t-word had become inflammatory to Muslims" and the "faster way to the hearts and minds of a Muslim audience was to talk about the tensions between Islam and the West in a different key."

Bet the president didn't think he was planting the seeds of today's protests in Egypt. But what does he expect when he goes to a country in a decades-long police-enforced state of emergency, with tens of thousands of political prisoners, and announces that "you must maintain your power through consent, not coercion"?

He may have awakened a sleeping giant. Too bad the Iranian people didn't receive the same favor a year and a half ago when they were protesting in the streets against a regime that makes Egypt look Jeffersonian by comparison.

Perhaps the president believes that the Nobel Peace Prize-winning Mohamed ElBaradei, the Egyptian who headed the U.N. nuclear agency, will emerge from house arrest and take over.

Revolutions are seldom so neat.

Ayman al-Zawahiri, Osama bin Laden's Egyptian-born right-hand man who merged al-Qaida with Egyptian Islamic Jihad, has long had designs on his native land.

In the Pulitzer-winning history of al-Qaida, "The Looming Tower," Lawrence Wright notes that Zawahiri's "strategy was to force the Egyptian regime to become even more repressive, to make the people hate it. In this he succeeded."

Embattled Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak was as afraid of real capitalism as of political dissent. The Heritage Foundation's latest Index of Economic Freedom gives Egypt poor marks despite recent "incremental reforms to liberalize the socialist economy."

Egypt's GDP growth fell markedly in the wake of the global financial crisis, and government corruption and the lack of a dependable rule of law in the economic sphere are factors that have kept poverty and unemployment painfully high — poisonously mixed with political repression.

Even so, should Mubarak fall, there is real danger of the Islamic Brotherhood imperiling this U.S. ally. Barack Obama sure picked a foolish place to give a community-organizing speech.

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